ok. mild upvote, but 'awesome'?

let me know if you can find someone over the age of 5 who is awestruck, y'know?

try 'geometric, cheap, and amusing'?

From the Bad Astronomy blog, www.badastronomy.com, which just named this as one of the best astronomical images of the year: "Studying the Sun seems like a pretty good idea; as the major source of light and heat for our planet, it’s a good thing that we try to understand it. And the Sun is a star, with all that implies: it’s huge in size, and frightening in its energy production.

To better understand it and the complicated nature of its surface activity, NASA launched a pair of satellites that can take pictures of the Sun simultaneously from different angles, providing a 3D view of our nearest star. They’re called the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or (haha) STEREO.

One satellite orbits the Sun ahead of the Earth, and the other behind. They stay in the same orbital plane as the Earth does in its travels around the Sun, and that means that sometimes you get interesting geometric situations which arise. The STEREO team realized that there would be a time when the Moon would pass in front of the Sun as seen by one of the spacecraft. Solar eclipses are rare on Earth, but from STEREO’s vantage it would be even more unusual.

From the Earth, the Sun is about 400 times farther away than the Moon, and is also about 400 times the Moon’s physical size. These two characteristics cancel out, meaning the Sun and Moon are about the same apparent size in the sky, so every solar eclipse has the Moon slipping in front of the Sun, with the dark disk of the Moon just barely (if even) covering the bright disk of the Sun.

That is, every solar eclipse as seen from the Earth.

But STEREO was receding from the Earth and Moon. To it, the Moon appeared much smaller than we see it, stuck as we are on the surface of our planet. The Sun, however, was still at about the same distance, and therefore looked the same size as we see it. This means that, to STEREO, the Moon appeared far smaller than the Sun.

Not long after launch, the situation arose that the Moon would pass directly in front of the Sun as seen from one of the spacecraft. STEREO turned its eye that way, and recorded what may be the most remarkable footage of a solar eclipse ever taken".

*promote

What's strange about it? The head of the hammer is much heavier, so the center of gravity is shifted from the geometric center to the head end (roughly beneath where the ruler touches the chair, apparently)

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Great movie and a better book.

I was a bit pissed when I first watched it, because they made this huge deal of of the religion vs. science thing - which wasn't in the book so much. I've since mellowed, but still like the book better.


In the book they had this cool thing where the Jodie Foster character at the end of the story, turned the pattern detection computers toward looking for patterns in repeating decimal numbers. She found numbers that geometrically represented this huge circle, a few thousand places in to pi. She took this as proof that the universe was artificially created. (kind of like finding a serial number stamp). Really fascinating stuff.

Chromophobia, 1966

"Raoul Servais achieved international acclaim with his ground-breaking, anti-militarist fable on repression, perseverance, and the indomitability of the human spirit, Chromophobia, a compact, yet articulate parable of an aggressive, chromophobic army that marches into an idyllic kingdom and systematically terrorizes the population by erasing all traces of color within its periphery, until a little girl unexpectedly cultivates a lone, resilient red flower in her garden. Evoking the instinctual compositions of a more geometric Joan Miró, the film is particularly remarkable in Servais' illustration of resonant, iconic symbolism: a balloon that is converted into a ball and chain mirrors the town's spiritual captivity, the transformation of trees into gallows represents the corrupted interrelation between life and unnatural death in times of war, flowers emerging from the barrel of a rifle reflects a restoration of peace and gesture of renewed humanity."

more on raoul servais...